Twitter for Photographers: 3 More Essential Tips

Twitter for Photographers: 3 More Essential Tips

For those of you just tuning in, we’ve been talking about Twitter as a tool for photographers. To catch up or refresh on the conversation, check out our previous posts in this series:

Twitter for Photographers: 5 Reasons to Hatch From Your Shell

Twitter for Photographers: 3 Essential Tips

Now for tips 4 through 6 to help you, the tweeting photographer, build your business and following.

4. Think Outside Your Immediate Interest

As you become more active on Twitter, your following will begin to grow. And when your following grows, social influence kicks in and you gain credibility. When users see that other users are following and tweeting you, they are more likely to do the same because as humans, we’re wired to base much of our behavior and perspective on that of others.

At this stage, it’s time to turbocharge your network. Obviously you’re here to link with colleagues and potential clients, but why stop there? Marketers, bloggers, designers, magazine editors, entrepreneurs, influencers, professors and even students are all valuable connections to build.

Think about it: the marketer might have a client who needs a photographer, while the blogger may want to interview you for an article. The designer can help you with your personal branding. The magazine editor, like the blogger, might be intrigued by your work. Meanwhile, the entrepreneur or influencer has a vast creative network to share. And the professor may invite you as a guest lecturer, where you can invite students to follow you on Twitter.

Everyone is someone.

5. Perform Manual Maintenance

Every once in awhile, Twitter will clean out fake accounts and you’ll lose some of your followers because they were spambots and not real users. There are various tools that allow you to remove fake followers yourself, but we actually have another intuitive yet understated suggestion:

Perform manual maintenance on your following count. In your quest to gain followers, the number of people you follow will likely grow somewhat proportionally. Every once in awhile during your downtime, sit down with a cup of coffee or a snack for an hour and do a “purge” of your own. Some users will follow you just for a follow back, and then later unfollow you to do whatever they’re trying to do with their numbers. It’s a really lame and counterproductive social media strategy, but these dummies run rampant on Twitter – unfollow them. You should also keep an eye out for users who are no longer very active, or who post offensive content.

6. Don’t Buy Followers

It’s easy to be tempted by the perceived power of having thousands of followers; resist that temptation.

For one, fake followers are null data. You won’t be able to measure your initiatives and results because all of your followers are short-lived bots and fabricated users who post ridiculous obscurities.

Second, it’s deceiving. Do you want to build your business and brand on dishonesty?

Lastly, it’s obvious. The average photographer is not socially expected to have tens of thousands of followers six months after signing up on Twitter. So not only will fake followers not help you; they’ll actually hurt you in the credibility department. Seriously, just don’t do it.

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Now that you have a running list of Twitter tips, which ones have helped you the most? Tweet us at @DuggalNYC with your thoughts.